Thursday, 30 July 2015

Traveller Campaign Update: Fall of Gallifrey Edition

In today's session, the PCs were still doing the trippiest cosmic-flashback ever, living out the lives of long-dead Ancients. They first got to see the final culmination of the world they'd been carefully guiding, the civilizations they were directing the evolution of, over 5000 years, reaching its fulfillment as "That planet of the empire that produces drawings of one square on top of another square". Yes, the Ancients were so powerful that they dedicated unimaginable levels of time and resources to tailor-engineering a planet of cubists:

(there's no accounting for taste)

The governor of this whole sector, guiding light of countless worlds, scourge of the daleks and war-hero saviour of the Empire is this guy:

Half the PCs are working for him. One of them is basically his chief henchman.

(you get to play the closest thing Traveller has to a Time Lord, and you still end up being this guy)

Now, this guy finally showed up too:

...in a cameo, for like 5 seconds.

Then the Sun started to blow up.

The PCs pretty quickly figured out that it was actually the Master; not out of some kind of senseless evil but out of simple total disregard for lesser beings. He needed to blow up the sun to try to master space/time in order to defeat the high council and the other Antients if he was to become undisputed ruler of the galaxy, and the cubists meant nothing to him.

The PCs were then stuck in a race to get out of the system, but there was another twist: a subversive group on the planet revealed to a couple of the PCs that they'd stolen the secret uplift code that could turn any of them into the mental and psychic equivalent of Ancients. When some of the others figured this out, they went and told the Master, and meanwhile had to decide (once the Master's plans became clear) whether they were going to be on the side of the Master, on the side of the High Council, or just in it for themselves.

There was a lot of secret conversations using this sort of thing:

And after a while, as the session progressed, it became less like Traveller and more like this:

With super-powerful near-immortal PCs vying with each other for power and survival in the ultimate contest of intrigue and guile, with the fate of the universe at stake.

It was awesome.

In the end, the PCs finally came out of it, back into the present and their real lives, and it became clear that the whole thing was some sort of test Grandfather Paradox made for them as some kind of test of character (though for what purpose remains unclear).

Now, Grandfather is there, and the Master is there, and they're about to blow each other all to shit, and maybe the PCs with them. Things ended, as usual, on a cliffhanger.